“Please don’t flow so fast”

Image © 2010 Peter Whincop.

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All images (photos and paintings/drawings © 2010-2011 Peter Whincop.

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SO MY SOUL CAN SING

she is not able to lean
  she could lie me flat
  i never taught her
  even that she needed
  that teaching
  fcuking thing or two
  or many

and sweetly
  face planting where i sat
  and it left the smell
  of me she never
  said kept her close
  because her words are
  an eel
  and then face planting
  just trails this
  with trash

all from an email there are many
  and that was the sweetest
  and most direct she was
  she has a silken tongue
  now she isnt like her
  eel words
  make from her a
  scarf
  with fiber reactive
  some chemical
  basic fixing
  im just avoiding
  saying dyeing

  she has never touched
    large breasts
    we looked at them together
    they would look strange apart
    i thought we never
    looked estranged

that were playing a game of the lion
  punky or aslan
  or whatever he was called
  in the wizard of oz
  where there is a little man
  behind a screen
  on some kind of machine
  peddling

    i never liked green
      more coke thats no joke
      poke veins that was not me

his wears the witch
  and the wardrobe
  should
  no there is
  are a few places
  of ex
  cision
  this follows from the part
  about the wizard of oz

where clothes are guarded
  i think i can learn
  from metric gashing
  they were torn
  and they were the
  greek plural of hymen

    long measure inside
      your head job
      was written for senior
      house
      over a year ago
      it is techno
      not mine
      it is noise
      mine

      my greatgrandfather
        and grandfather
        we called him poppa
        which is what dad is
        now called
        they were both mine
        sweepers in two different
        wars or their boats
        were and they were
        commodores

it plays tricks
  it i have faith in
  it can hurt the timpanum
  just the right one
  because i am not nasty
  because it sucks draws
  really hurts
  thump okay that isnt so nice

once a lien is forced upon
  my sister is a lawyer
  and i imagine she is
  a very good one just because
  a property and there is
  he is forced upon
  would be knees but
  no turning back
  it is forfeit
  youre damaged goods

and by you of youre
  i dont mean you
  a person
  well barely
  i mean the other
  people you have
  as friends or something
  like that

you have crossed a lion
  and you failed to
  recognize the verb
  i read in my
  verlaine translation
  zebraed

    jen k and i loved
      and the fake zebra
      skin and canopy
      were i think
      perfect and well
      timed and

    jen m
      is dream
      other than
      and perfect in fact honest
      so not one just plu
      perfect
      since recently
      i woke up

i cleft phalanx
  behind and tainted
  because how ever
  could something
  that has the trappings
  of something attractive
  and needed
  and

    it was my lien
      i am alien
      it was at me lying
      onto them
      me no
      no lean

you dont go near poison
  she has caused
  damage
  from bite
  cold twice
  nunce shy
  because they play
  golf on rooftops

she visited my
  home and saw
  the floodgates open
  like bloodletting
  from a liver problem

she opened those gates
  she stood near the sulpheric
  vents at the center
  of my country
  of my country
  she courtesy raped
  my parents and
  my home
  and my life

how to identify yourself
  protect let yourself
  be known everywhere
  post mad
  sui generis
  everywhere
  do not lie ever
  let everyone you dont
  know know you

then plans are like the
  things that
  are anonymous
  infinity
  and other
  foiled again

she and therefore you
  lied lied lied
  that is three times
  i really mean year
  you dont toy with love
  as fcuked up and lame as
  that sounds
  so the following holds
  true in
  that

i dont really like
  fcuking if it is
  more like its past tense
  with with with the
  to be thing in
  front of it

then tortured
  just a moment
  that there are some things
  agreeable
  and as with property
  contract other things
  my sister talks about law
  plots of land and
  needs to be assessed
  of course
  it was
  really flogging
  a dead she aint what
  she used to be
  no she wasnt

then tortured
  then hissed at
  but i wasnt supposed to
  know i found out
  just like kenneth anger
  and doris day
  street car named
  desire
  whos afraid
  careful with that
  axiom person i forget
  ultravixens and crapping on hitler in a bath

then they
  or it her
  lied cheated stole
  charged threatened
  and i am
  am i i
  asked anything

i think not
  because ill let you
  think my mind is wrecked
  my mind is wrecked
  no it isnt
  i dont know kung fu
  but im you know the line
  the rest of it

i can write in many ways
  and they all stare at you
  to save you from
  having to stare
  and this part
  is funny
  when i would write
  in front of people
  who might have been hostile
  or at least expert
  dormant in some
  i imagine latent
  before i knew them
  i wouldnt do it now
  to two people and

    they know who they are
      not that that is
      important
      i like them
      i like they are friends
      and if they
      it not bothers
      me too
      much even if they
      do not like me
      because wisdom doesnt
      operating on a need
      too
      know laws and policy
      helps
      early letter
      thank you for whatever reason
      that

a strange phrase
  or using funny strokes
  and it would mean something
  or not
  and i would know which
  but to see them
  unpuzzle or try
  was in the most
  happy in
  miserable days i have known

      one of you dressed in very
      naughty clothes
      for three
      i wasnt
      weeks
      it was a struggle
      but so was
      so was
      was

because i was aware and
  couldnt even muster
  suicidal feelings
  to see their faces
  heads tilted with
  that puzzle
  meant to be left alone
  and the eyes trying hard
  not to be caught looking

and it still works
  and it is like
  the end of the great escape
  when our hero is caught
  by hearing the right
  language when he should
  have left it alone
  it is funny how
  people are really
  very naked

naked

but those x ray glasses
  sold for ten cents
  in nineteen fifties comic books
  take time to wear
  but they work

and the moral of
  this story is that this
  story how
  can i return to
  anything
  and how can i let
  every detail
  remain the same not
  for me but just because
  and how can

a thief liar cheat whore
  which is a mythical
  being and not possible
  in the real world
  therefore was not only
  part of a nightmare
  but the breeding horse
  of dark hours

itself and there was
  once a bag and she at
  least pretended
  well she did that
  too well for
  a long

time to like cats
  but she is really
  a dog
  person i think
  and through
  extreme smugness
  let that cat
  right out of
  that bag

it dint

come back the very next day

and nothing can stop us now
  which was a cheap song of my
  guilty pleasures she said she liked
  and i am the only body she will know
  and she will never leave me
  we will be together for our whole lives
  she loves my mind
  and wonders what it would be like
  to be inside of me
  like my phrase to be alone
  together and to rest her
  head on my heart and to
  fcuk me i think only
  so i would pass out
  except for those parvors
  her blight i imagine
  and says we are fully bonded
  that we are inseparable
  that she needs me
  for her whole life and her only
  genuine cry was when i was actually

leaving her for real
  she doesnt know that
  i was leaving her
  for real that terrible may
  ergo
  her crocodile tears won the
  wrong award which is quite funny
  they were fake tears
  you fcuking bitch arse cnut
  and that it
  took a lot to stay
  but i chose
  to overlook
  discrepancies because
  young people are supposed
  to grow up and i was
  evidently more than
  willing to

wait when i first realized
  she was a cheat and a liar
  but she wasnt a liar
  she was a lie

she was a lie
  her legs parted easily
  and her lips said come hither
  but they never quite said
  my name but guess who i
  am

thinking of right now
  god i am stupid
  but love strikes
  in the the same
  place
  burn an eyebrow

she was right
  very right
  and i am the body etc
  and loves together lives
  bonded whole inside nothing stop

but define the long measure inside
  your head job
  i think she is trapped there
  until i die or go far away
  and she needs me to be healthy
  while my brain is her living space

i dont understand who she is
  i know who she is
  i dont understand what she is
  why she lives in my head
  i do not know what the real
  person is then and why
  and more why
  sweetly so
  was i raped like penetrated
  but there is no withdrawal

and i will do everything
  i can balance a lot
  she must regret and hurt
  she asks for human protection
  she asks to be have

protection from humans
  she is not real
  even if somewhere she is
  and i will never see that
  monster horrific disgusting
  i saw a photo of her cnut
  in a very naughty pose

she who does not
  pay rent but
  asunder knows how deeply
  and intensely
  i wanted to vomit
  seeing something so horrific
  and that even a
  photo of her

prettiness makes me
  have to cover my eyes and agonize groan
  very uncomfortably
  even bite my piano muscle
  joining my thumb to
  my hand on the top
  which would be partly
  from masturbating

but you got the wrong hand
  because i genuinely
  cant stand the sight
  of her and i hear
  her voice when played
  because i cannot see or

hear her in any memory
  because she has faded
  the good has faded
  she is truly
  adjective
  abject
  they havent invented it yet
  but it will be short
  with the only vowels
  being faux and awkward
  and lets just use schwars

and the consonants
  grating and harsh
  and not dwell on a word
  for such an unworthy
  cause of

so i understand little
  behind the scenes
  and how it is
  connected to the sky and
  to lights and ice
  and twigs and the hairs
  on my arms

and to faces and
  things that
  fascinate
  but i am not gullible
  doppelgänger
  monstrosity
  i am not
  full of
  foot

i dont need to ask about why
  the latin word
  verber
  makes feedback
  need some latin
  it means lash as in
  lash out not as
  in eye lash
  out

and i dont know why she needs
  to extend her nerves
  into my brain
  or i am imagining this
  or there is nothing in my head
  because there is some fancy
  research into tapping
  into brains without
  entering them

and so many ands
  and i do not think
  we hear about most research
  and that is not because it
  is sponsored by our government

think hard about that

which
  and how strange is this
  i am on their side
  my former enemy
  imperialism
  because they rape and pillage
  and are systematic abusers and
  aggressors and racists and
  so many other things

a reminder are you thinking of that that

but that is the nature of
  the bourgeois beast
  and who knows
  i do
  that one day things will be
  different but not in this way
  the writing is not on the wall
  or books or in that way
  but privately together
  not by metaphor
  or foraging
  through

id say everything
  but i have laryngitis
  and here is the only
  punctuation here
  ripping that hymen
  i mentioned before
  because guess what
  it was symbolic
  and i always preferred
  symbolic solutions in math
  to number crunching:

the mark is a colon
  because they are full
  of sh!t
  and the american government
  and people did not plan
  to be this way
  as terrible as it is
  and some are
  in general

but these other people
  who tortured me
  though that is a small
  part of their subterfuge
  and the secular zion
  with a bitter twisted
  head though like a

rhizome or a
  flat hierarchy
  and they have ordained
  themselves and are ordained
  into things that they oppose
  but are blind to it
  rapists them all
  face off like the movie
  with somebody cage
  and the scientologist

it might have been
  someone else
  this is all to say
  they are truly planned
  evil of evil
  they know they know
  they dont really comprehend

and are virtually
  illiterate with very few
  exceptions and
  they struggle to gather
  people who know
  anything other than
  their expertise

so i am blessed it seems

    they flattered me

to be what they thought
  was stupid
  but

they are the smartest
  of course and
  soulless people
  some have souls but are

    masochist sadist amuck forth running bare

misled
  bishopric
  of course people are confused
  or have been
  even promoted even rewarded
  by self importance by duty
  or some other leverage
  just as in the
  dumbest parts of history
  or the pawns
  held tight to their

chests or underage
  and how do cults
  work
  by communications of course
  i think i know
  because one especially
  cultureless clueless
  almost famed
  one around here
  for her virtues
  as they are
  and brilliance

makes me think of the
  late 1970s and
  i am your automatically lover
  i am made from the cloth
  i am maiden material
  fabric

has doped my synaptic
  band gaps
  and i only semi
  conduct myself
  now but i am
  so STRONG

iamFEAR
  less

they plan they are revolting
  it is essential
  not accidental
  if you didnt pick up
  on it
  that was quite philosophical

that you do not know
  what is happening
  which is kind of
  what you collectively
  which is one of the
  many contradictions in
  your coming
  insidious
  directionless
  or just a utopian
  teleology without
  having chewed on
  your fat
  big ugly λόγος
  or is it prosaic
  logos

i sometimes forget
  i am addressing
  not murmuring

they do not know
  i do not care
  but they do not know
  and all i want is
  death of my current
  brain derrangement
  also their utter failure
  but history is kind
  so i die
  or i dont
  and i dont
  care and IF
  i live

then
  words that continue
  this diatribe
  and those word
  are

One Line Too Many, A Thousand Not Enough.

Throwing out the Baby with the Barthes Water.

(Said the tree: P here) My first masters (Mus.M. incomplete of course) thesis was entitled “S/A: on the Death of Socrates and Analysis.” Clearly that is ridiculously clever. But the retarded voice in my head, which is extremely retarded (did I mention?), is indicating a complete synaptic firing of a blank. S/A = an “essay,” and “to essay.” The thesis was on Erik Satie’s Mort de Socrate, the third movement, you know, with the hemlock. Which itself is around a thousand things to comment on, hence the masters level (ASP-RPG = academic single-play role-playing game). And it was analysis, but (kind of falteringly) a deconstruction of the act of music analysis. I was an angry young man, disliking the rigor of structuralist methods. Or anything else I was made to learn or was forcibly taught. But it was a kind of inversion of Roland Barthe’s S/Z: an Essay. That book is a virtuosic retelling, analysis, meta-analysis, method, meta-hodos, whatever ever, “anything you can do he can do meta” way beyond (ugh, that’s what “meta” means) what anyone else could do. Barthes was the bridge from structuralism to post-structuralism, I think. And following his writings is really a pretty decent way to follow French critical thought from the early 60s to the 80s. (The S and the Z more than anything else refer to the difference between the grapheme “s” and the /z/ sound that we make—if at all in French.)

Here a couple of things about Barthes. I love him; his work is a pleasure to read as well as dripping in meaning about a thousand times richer, more useful, reasonable, beautiful, and unambiguous (can can something be more unambiguous? That’s like driving twice as slow. Or, kind of morally or medically, smoking “natural” cigarettes is better for you health I THINK NOT! Not as disastrously terrible. But you never hear it put that way, so I mean, less ambiguous) as any Great Pretenders to drippiness. (I’d rather be a raindrop than a drip, as the song goes.) There is not a senseless moment, there is no talk about nothing, there could never be a high sin tax levied because his word order is consistent, and ~-ly “just right” (pretty left, actually) in the Goldilocks sense.

I’ll look for the original (translators are very smart people) but my French is not my Italian or Latin (where I can beat out a fairly good translation, or correct some over-zealous or determined one, in fact, in all my premature perjaculations, my shortcomings, I think I’m pretty okay at translating or editing. I took quite a subtle bashing because I have always, only when invited and with a gentle hand, corrected girlfriends’ papers, mss., whatever, and that is because I am deflecting my own writing agenda (Latin, things to be done). So I can feel good at writing well. A lot of journalistic writing that mixes units of thought (50% of this, but 0.3 of that): all that needs correcting. The Greeks and Romans had terms for Rhetorical figures, for a reason. But I did notice that my uncontorting of texts (“but, although they, often consider—only by...” non-tail-end recursing) was often ignored. It took me a while to realize quite why, especially as the issue was directly raised within that very reason. Okay, a little philosophically regressive or retrogressive. But, again, how the hoity toity in the modern sense are really the hoity toity in the old sense (the pretentious are mere fools).

) somewhere. Why should thoughts be com

This is a nice summary of one of the essays in Barthes’ slender volume Image, Music, Text. (Another such work is his Mythologies, well worth reading, say, before diving into Žižek’s exercises in Pop Culture.) It is a summary of “The Photographic Message” (from the Hill Editition, Ed. and Trans. Stephen Heath, 1977. pp.15-31) by Laurie Dickinson on the teaching website of Prof. Michael Hancher. [Retrieved from http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibld3.html on 20110124-1016.]

In this essay, Barthes sees the newspaper as “a complex of concurrent messages with the photograph as centre and surrounds constituted by the text, the title, the caption, the lay-out and... by the very name of the paper” (15). He separates the totality of the representation into two structures—the visual and the textual—which are “contiguous but not ‘homogenized’” (16), and, laying the question of textual signification to the side, focuses on elaborating “a structural analysis of the photographic message” (16) and then on projecting some methods whereby the photographic image and attendant text relate. The photograph, according to Barthes, “transmit[s]... the scene itself, the literal reality” (17); that is, it provides a “perfect analogon” of the object represented. This direct representation (the “what it is”) is the photograph’s “denoted” message. In addition, a photograph also conveys “a connoted message, which is the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it” (17, italics in original). (Paintings or other, more ‘worked,’ visual forms, on the other hand, have a second-order meaning which is the denoted or representational (first-order) meaning supplemented by the second-order style or ‘treatment’ of the image.) Barthes lays out six “connotation procedures” or processes whereby a photograph takes on a connoted meaning. These are: trick effects, pose, objects which index certain things, photogenia, aestheticism, and syntax, where photographs exist in a series. Connotation is historical or social in the sense that how an image is connoted is entirely dependent on the conventions and expectations of the society within which that image appears. In his example, an image of fire will connote very differently in a culture in which predominates a belief in hell as an actual, physical place from one in which no such belief exists.

In his discussion of the interrelation between text and image, Barthes lays out two paradigmatic forms of interaction: in the first, the “image illustrate[s] the text” and in the second, “the texts loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (26). In fact, he states, since words can’t “‘duplicate’ the image,” there is a new space of signification created “in the movement from one structure to the other [where] secondary signifieds are inevitably developed” (26).

If more people read Barthes...

And here are two quotes I lifted straight from my copy of the Hill edition, trans. Richard Miller, 1974. I will just leave them, “we have a neither confirm nor deny policy”; and try to find the French to sea how the translation shores up.

The more indeterminate the origin of the statement, the more plural the text. In modern texts, the voices are so treated that any reference is impossible: the discourse, or better, the language, speaks: nothing more. By contrast, in the classic text the majority of the utterances are assigned an origin, we can identify their parentage, who is speaking: either a consciousness (of a character, of the author) or a culture (the anonymous is still an origin, a voice...); however, it may happen that in the classic text, always haunted by the appropriation of speech, the voice gets lost, as though it had leaked out through a hole in the discourse. The best way to conceive the classical plural is then to listen to the text as an iridescent exchange carried on by multiple voices, on different wavelengths and subject from time to time to a sudden dissolve, leaving a gap which enables the utterance to shift from one point of view to another, without warning: the writing is set up across this tonal instability (which in the modern text becomes atonality), which makes it a glistening texture of ephemeral origins. (41–42)

The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the muiltivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration. The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network—all the movements and inflections of a vast “dissolve,” which permits both overlapping and loss of messages. Hence we use Code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted.The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns; the units which have resulted from it (those we inventory) are themselves, always, ventures out of the text, the mark, the sign of a virtual digression toward the remainder of a catalogue...; they are so many fragments of something that has been already read, seen, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already. Referring to what has been written, i.e., to the Book (of culture, of life, of life as culture), it makes the text into a prospectus of this Book. Or again: each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is “lost” in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voice (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect: the Voice of Empirics (the proairetisms), the Voice of the Person (the semes), the Voice of Science (the cultural codes), the Voice of Truth (the hermeneutisms), the Voice of Symbol. (20–21)

Any text, from any book, by Barthes (not the theologian) is worth more than a casual read. More a causal one. Oh, Susan Sontag is very interesting: her collection of essays on photography, which is called On photography, go out and read it; interesting feminist critiques, and on multiple “readings” of photos. I love her tag-line for her website: “If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension to my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”

While I’m P-ing, A will [verb]: Belle and Sebastian, “Sukie in the Graveyard” (The Life Pursuit, 2006). I must have just written about “brass rubbing” somewhere else because that is what made me think of this song. I hope they don’t mind me posting it; Stuart Murdoch is one of the great craftsmen of the English/British language. He doesn’t drink the alcohol and is a vegetarian. He is thinks he is “straight to the point of boring himself.” (I think there’s a name for that; at least he didn’t say “dead boring.”)

Sukie was the kid, she liked to hangout in the graveyard
She did brass rubbings, she learned you never had to press hard
When she finished hanging out she was all alone
She decided that she better check in at home
There was an awful row between her mum and dad
They said she hadn’t done this, she hadn’t done that
If she wanted to remain inside the family home
She’d have to tow the line, she’d have to give it a go
It didn’t suit Sukie
So she took her things and left

Sukie was the kid, she liked to hang out at the art school
She didn’t enrol, but she wiped the floor with all the arseholes
She took a bijou flat with the fraternity cat
She hid inside the attic of the sculpture building
She had a slut slave and his name was Dave
She said ‘Be my photo bitch and I’ll make you rich’
He didn’t believe her but the boy revered her
He got her meals and he got her a bed
He watched behind the screen and she started to undress
He never got far
Just lookin’ and playing guitar

Autumn hanging down all the trees are draped like chandeliers
Sukie saw the beauty but she wasn’t wet behind the ears
She had an A1 body and a face to match
She didn’t have money, she didn’t have cash
With the winter coming on, and the attic cold
She had to press her nose on the refectory wall
They served steamed puddings she went without
She had to pose for life for all the scholars of art
She didn’t feel funny, she didn’t feel bad
Peeling away everything she had
She had the grace of an eel, sleek and stark
As the shadows played tricks on the girl in the dark

Sukie was the kid, she liked to hangout in the graveyard

It is very sad that smug cleverness and certain cultivation has a longer left leg: wrongly leans right loftily. Tears me up. I just noticed that plato upside looks a little like adolf. (I think the inclusion of the backward-masked Satanic message in “Stairway to Heaven” is to draw attention to how backward Satanism is, or something. Probably something, as things are.) But there is no irony or wit to be found in the plato/hitler thing, as I am sure that, if the latter could read the former, then the latter (which was previously the former but I’m now referring to a more recent clause) would acknowledge the [other] was a role model, except for the whole race thing rather than meritocratic thing. Which leaves two final thoughts: Some people who fit themselves into the category of “merit” think that Michael Young’s 1958 essay (now a short book) is seriousness posing as satire. He he. And, lead singer of OK Damien Kulash says (taken from Wikipedia), “The great thing about the internet is it is a meritocracy and it’s free.” Makes me want to find an abacus, and two tin cans with a string connecting them. Or... I’m not reading it right.

Not much left to say.

Is this an Exaptation to the Rule of Hegemony?

Try it at 480, not 360. And full screen.

Living Smear Campaign.

I spy with my little eye something beginning with... lots of things.

<yawn>

It makes me want to sing or pray, or go after a homonym.

All in all it’s just another, hey, that’s not a brick...

[Try it full screen. At full HD.] I sleep with a light on now.

Comment on YouTube:

Came home, thought I’d shoot the blank wall, raised the lights, saw my ex-girlfriend there. Then I blinked a few times, started seeing the English rock invasion group The Faces or just some face small faces. Lots, some, depends how you look at it. Actually, it’s a photo of wall, and nobody’s there. The movie is the gamma (contrast) being altered. It’s a nice way of seeing ghosts and memories and corruption and dreams (and forget that comment about corruption).

Hold that Thought!

I have some Sneaky Feelings or some other 80s bands like Psychic TV or Simple Minds or Ultravox or Wall of Voodoo or ... that we are all brainwashed. I mean that in the “How can you have any pudding...”* kind of way.

[very incomplete]

*I.

Daddy’s flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
A snapshot in the family album
Daddy, what else did you leave for me
Daddy, wha’dya leave behind for me
All in all it was just a brick in the wall
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall

The Happiest Days of Our Lives
You, yes you, stand still, laddie

When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers
Who would hurt the children in any way they could
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
Exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids

But in the town it was well known
When they got home at night
Their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them
Within inches of their lives

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

II.

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave those kids alone
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone
All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave those kids alone
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall

III.

I don’t need no arms around me
And I don't need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don’t think I need anything at all
No, don’t think I need anything at all
All in all, it was all just bricks in the wall
All in all, you were all just bricks in the wall

“Time to go.”
“Wrong do it again!”
“If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding, how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat!”
“You! Yes, you! behind the bikesheds, stand still laddie!”

—Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall” (The Wall)

I Have a Splitting Headache.

He was in two minds about something. In South Park, who exactly is Mr. Hat? Who does he stand in for? Sex (not Mr. Hat; I’ve moved on). Chef likes to sing about the sweet lovin’, but when Kathie Lee wants more, Chef says, ... “I just gave you some 5 minutes ago, are you trying to kill me?” But, it’s nice to be close. Somehow buried her(e), perhaps 10cm deep, which is kind of embarrassing I can only but imagine, is a notion that promiscuity has a purpose, sex can be completely impersonal, but it has to be acted personally. Because, don’t males drowse off into a pleasant state (do they Peter? No, you have parvors and you have to be kept awake? What kind of a person of Slavic—timid perhaps—descent are you?! I’m actually pretty much Anglo).

In that way, my headache lasted between three and four years, the doctors are unsure, rather than the usual few months for my stress condition. At one point “they” said, it’s too late.

Never.

I will put up suggestions on how to deal with the issues raised on South Park, of which there are vary many. By the way, this headache thing is really a projection of the the very first episode, 01x01, which involves Cartman getting an anal probe. Next time I will go into a deeper analysis of the show. It’s more than “I think I learned something today,” though such a straightforward sentiment is useful for pointing certain people in the right direction.

I hope, just because I write these lame-o commentaries, I am not mistaken for one such person. On Labor Day I wear muted tones with my single red item of clothing—the latter being a tradition.

Above is I have idea, and below is... try to figure out what it says.

When do you decide when enough is enough? You have too know first that there is something of which there can be enough. I have a very pretty and nice smelling boxset of 33 1/3 singles and a CD-ROM called A Box Full of Ghosts. The 7”s are by TV Pow/Liminal, Kazumoto Endo/Incapacitants, and Christian Marclay/Otomo Yoshihide; and the CD-ROM with videos from Otomo Yoshihide, Melt Banana, Xome, TV Pow, Liminal, Flexible Products. It was a 42nd birthday present to Peter from a pretty amazing guy. I’m still wondering about, well, (Peter here) I made a piece in January 2003, which was an especially snowy/icy winter, the worst we had had in New England for quite some time. The streets were long mirrors with white dashes visible down them. Pretty clean though. The piece had two versions, and I combined them (mainly because in the first version, my parents called me, and I forgot I was recording a live filtering performance, and there is a five minute blank in it; I liked it but people didn’t—from which we can conclude I am not “people,’ well, perhaps plural).

The second version had some contorted title, something like “Song For Wh*” meaning whom, what, when, where, etc. The first version is called Repeat Love Offence. (I gave it the English spelling. It looks kind of weird, so I think I’ll change it.) The first version is called Repeat Love Offense. Nothing really having to do with apparent offenses, more demands made on people, males. I have felt manipulated, used, abused (but not quite body-raped, though I would say mind-raped), sexually. That’s all. At least I don’t carry my seminal fluid in my neck, because I imagine I’d end up having my head bitten off. Oh, perhaps I’d like to be a Preying Mantis, because I don’t like my head.

Meet wonderful ex-girlfriend (who’s name starts with A). I have had two girlfriends named Andrea (okay, we’ve each had one). This is the London one, a really wonderful person. Alive, and kicking organ pedals in some of the best churches in England. She’s an organ virtuoso. The other sadly is terminally ill; I suppose chronically and acutely ill would have applied too. Unfortunately she is not in the same city anymore, and keeps to herself. We all respond to these things differently. But I feel as if a little prayer of hers sits within me, in my thoughts. That might be premature, and a little religious, but, there you go. Your world view has to change when your world actuality changes. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it. (It seems as if someone has photoshopped her to look a little different, but I’m used to that crap. She still look mighty fine to me.)

In December 2009, I made a piece, simply piling in some quite violent/teleological (path-seeking or -finding) sounds on top of a techno piece, “Louder” (original mix) by Jose Amnesia ft. Jennifer Rene. I called it, without putting too much thought into it, but it seemed to fit well, and now more than ever the music glove fits the brain hand (and oh how it likes to wave or waver or waive or or or), “LongMeasureInsideYourHeadJob.” However pertinent a title such as that can be—and I’d say, very Englishly, “quite”—I do not know what possessed me to call it that. It’s one word, as if the title is not fully formed, an incomplete joining of ideas such that things have got their stickiness all wrong. They need to think Lotus Effect of Beta Waves as the Heart Pulses and I Dream with Much Fear. But I am fear. The rest of my name (A here) will be explained, because there’s a whole story folded or wrapped up in it. But different. As with Apple (in my eye), Think Different. An interior monolog can.

I Need More Than an Art Studio, I Need Photoshop.

Here are photos of Peter surrounded by his art. Next time he’ll be surrounded by me, and I’ll post those pictures, or just post a link to Met Art because that’s how hot I am. These are the first photos of him with his art that have been published internationally and I imagine millions of people are looking at him thinking, yeah, what a dickhead.

Marker pen and very nice paper:-

One side of the living room which is almost the dying room as we use inks and dyes, and also because the xylene and acetone in the fixatives/finishes/ spray paint are pretty atmospherically turning our heads into whether balloons: do we open the windows?

And in the bathroom, a crooked plexiglass number. It’s hard to know where the hyp-hen falls: -iglass, -glass, -lass, -ass. For some fformer ffriends, no doubt -ss. In New Zealand, godzone, we can plexiglass perspex. Much cleverer. Like perspicacious.

He is very conscious of how the close-ups distort his face. What a vain little prick (not gematriacly-speaking).

van der Waal Forces are So Passé.

As mentioned below, the person who has all-but vanished—there are ways to lose weight that are quite severe—due to the friend-antifriend combination, though a neutrino was released along with an anti-electron. Which is significant because he works with semiconductors, for sure, on transneural electronics (which baffle me), but he also works with what transistors used to be and what relays became. Kind of sucked it out of history, deflecting cold war woes.

One dark and stormy knight, for he is chivalrous, and has the title CRMJ (don’t ask, but I think it means he used to load my old dioder (it was IKEA?)’s pF—which could mean soft→LOUD—capacitor with his charge)—it’s an easy LED thing that flashes or changes colors in two modes—surreptitiously, cycling perhaps like on the Tour de France; or just blatantly as is a bicycle at a velodrome doing the sprint: sometimes extreme spurts of speed, sometimes stays in the same place, apparently teetering (on my birthday, of all times, got the electrical stitch/glitch), until the other guy comes up from behind, then k’boom, races to the finish line ready for the next race (though she is ffairly picky)—we loved our dioders. Or you could convince the critter—we had eight, one for each day of the week—to stay on one color—it seemed to me it was stuck on a very nice color for a few years even (was it faulty, or FAVLTY—For A Very Long Time, or at fault?). But how wrong I was—IKEA, as much as possible, is not BO Concept (though Finnish or Icelandic spring to mind too, design being what it is).

Anyway, this knight of rare and wonderful devices, such as a giant antenna (in slenderness and ability to receive waves and rumor or murmur has it, transmit, i.e., across a glove), and a Wall of Voodoo (with its cover of Ring of Fire). He told me on a night of quite forceful snow that his father was a non-teaching professor of theoretical physics who was invited to head a lab in his new country of residence—he is from country A, was schooled in country B, and finished his secondary education in country C, whose language become his primary language, and then tertiary education in this country, which has now kindly made space for him—with an unlimited budget. And that he really need didn’t such a high budget as most of the technology he needed was already there, and he needed only around ten research assistants.

The person relayed his father’s work: on neutron stars. No, he didn’t actually land on a neutron star and try to breath in its atmosphere. Such stars are tiny, and are almost black holes as they have collapsed so densely. And according to some, they have no atmosphere. But this person said they have a tiny atmosphere, his father discovered, just 10cm deep, and upon probing that atmosphere, discovered the never-heard of physical model of fundamental particles of the plasma ephemorally bonding by magnetic field, kind of a single pulse which is how long the bond lasted. Something about spin states, but what isn’t; what isn’t about putting a spin on things. Or some kind of unbelievable state. Anyway, this is not electrostatic attraction as is the case with fundamental particle physics as we know it; but it doesn’t actually contradict our model or/of reality, so there is no collision of sub-universes which would then wipe each other out. They cohabit space.

My ex-girlfriend used to explain mad sirence to me, as we called it, and person saw a diagram of the hybrid primary orbitals of a water molecule she had drawn in a Spanish town, which was to show how the electrons were not “bound” to a particular hydrogen atom, nor were they in fact really upset at the idea of getting their little selves around the big oxygen atom. So hydrogen bonds could be drawn. And also the very weak van der Waal forces—she drew a lot of δ-s and δ+s. What do you know, here it is!

He said the water molecule would be described as—and I forget the details, I bet β and σ quarks were significant—h+ h++ 4 O -- - or something—just like blood types, and the categories were the same: circulating or spilling/flowing out. I said WOW!—it was so amazing. And he wrote the 1000 line Fortran code—they say 1 line is too many, and 1000 not enough—to solve partial differential equations for the theoretical model for his father, and had been doing so since he was a teenager.

Both amazing and amazingly fascinating and lying somewhere between amazing and insanely amazing. I shan’t forget that night, even if I forgot it for a long time until recently. He also demonstrated that capacitors became inductors at very high frequencies, and the converse, and demonstrated it with the fancy piece of test equipment I had given him (I had found it and had no use for it, but he used it for everything, as it “could test the only things his array of test equipment couldn’t test, and went to very many more numerical places than anything else”—I learned what a mantissa was—I thought it was a type of ray). Plus he explained basic lab electronics to my ex-girlfriend—we are talking years ago, but not long enough that it was shocking and current news—starting with, and only about MOSFETs. Something about the word, something about the action.

Ugh. I was sucked in just as much as his favorite devices are. But he fixed, and had a somewhat loud friend fix several of my devices, which tended to have power regulator circuit/device problems. He inserted some pretty fancy part that took care of things and me, and—hey presto—my rare and wonderful devices worked like waves of magic. I was drunk with smiles, and almost had to be hospitalized with the delirium tremens.

That’s Why Friends are Four. Gone.

A purported friend sent this to P this summer. I wish I had been in a situation in which “Charmed, I’m sure” would have been an appropriate response to meeting this person.

My very dear Peter!

How are things?! How’s ooo? How’s healthy summertime for you?

I wanted to tell you a whole big lot of things in a lengthy message, which I will do, but just not yet, for as right now, I've got only one directive for you:

Watch All That Jazz.

It contains genius script elements such as:

“Katie, I try to give you everything I can give”
“Oh you give alright—presents clothes—I just... wish... you weren’t so generous with your cock...”
(after a contemplative silence)
“That’s good... I can use that some time.”

And:

“Now don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

Oh and from the wikipedia page:

“Without a daily dose of Vivaldi, Visine, Alka-Seltzer, Dexedrine and sex, he wouldn’t have the energy to keep up the biggest show of them all—his life.”

Now, I haven’t finished watching the film, but as I am only about half an hour in, I already feel pretty certain that you shall appreciate this movie.

Wish you all the very best!

With great friendship and admiration,
o|oo

To this I might up the class a little, up the ante fairly evenly:

Ubi sunt poetry also figures in some of Shakespeare’s plays. When Hamlet finds skulls in the Graveyard (V. 1), these rhetorical questions appear:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr’d in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning—quite chap-fall’n. Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.

[Title.]

Image is of a dining room table, with a fish, is it cod, alewife, or... nah! we don’t eat the dead sea-creatures. It’s an inverted splodge that is meaningful to us, kind of a dating thing. Image © Peter Whincop 2011.

Sorry for all the silly photos. Even though I’ll claim they are virtually untouched, just color-corrected, and made to have their longest side at 998px or 4.99in at 72dpi non-rotation-fixed JPEG, blah and more blah, they are all forgeries. I have shaped every aspect of the images. I don’t have a computer that can zap magic particles at clouds—laser, “sound blaster/laser,” sonic hologram, ionized magic, plasma guns, supersonic dark-matter rays, Bose-Einstein Condensate The Head Phone Tomb, UFOs, god, collective concentration where meditation takes us all to a special shared space, rabies or toxoplasmosis or syphilis (or anything else that alters neural networks). No, I have a 2 1/2-year-old MacBook Pro that is capable of transmitting data even with Airport off, no ethernet connection, and Bluetooth disabled; and it can take videos and photos without the green light going on—a couple of students of mine who worked at Apple as summer interns, posted to our class mailing listed something about the green light being impossible to be disconnected from the iSore camera that comes with MacBook Pros. So, hard wear and tear and wicked coding skills abound. Or a retinal implant, or a deviating optic nerve, or little magnetic pulses* into the cerebellum (“little brain”).

Therefore I shape everything using cloud computing, because with the videos, Final Cut takes forever (hubris takes a oneskin, twoskin, threeskin,... who?) and a day, even briskly, even as fast as is possible when I am visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (I’m Jew-ish, I can say these things. A, that is.)

*A friend (but I am sure it is an anti-friend relationship), told me what his father’s research was, and what role he played in it. Truly amazing and attractive stuff from SH—it boggles the mind. [To be continued above under “van der Waal Forces are So Passé.]

Oh, a thought while it is still detectable by my fingers: journals such as Literary and Linguistic Computing (which no doubt warrants a <strong> designation) probably have in their wisdom orbifolded ascetic esoterotic—or exo-—advices or sapience more than meets the night-wanderlusting well-read mind’s eye, (ego cogito ergo sum?) they go deeper than that. The academe snakes its head way in secretly, or sneaks its way sacredly: perhaps the same Hegelian synthesis. And my other thought (just two for the night, except I have some music to post, perhaps a silly video I took of Peter and he I think has one of me from my “rock star” days, and the usual flurry of photos) (I had to say that f-word as we have been more than dusted with the white powder slightly iridescent stuff, but not the desiccated variety that... <transmission is lost, Faraday cage alert for 4‘33”—in which at Harvard’s anechoic chamber, now destroyed, the composer famously said he could hear two sounds in the silence. One turned out to be his heart beating, and the other the sound of his own nervous system talking to him or just doing whatever nervous systems do>)

Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. “testing purity of cocaine” forum—as elucidating as its hygroscopically-inhibited iridescence. Probably other parts of the form, as it usually the case with these things. Superficially it is interesting, quaint use of language though certainly not as offshore as .ru would suggest; and at face-value, FWIW, well, if that is different from a superfice of an edifice, then there might be something in that poetry of such frenetic phonetic ex-streams (across the blood-brain barrier or some encephallic scope* detail of brain activism) of faux-confident posturing. (I’d know a few wasted types thinking not so tactically sound using the logic of two big fat lines, two walrus tusks, that sound in “I am the Walrus” that people make, and walruses are like sea lions which sounds like c-lines, which gets us back full oceanic (to cleveland) circle (for Bostonians), or the sea ess lion or C. S. Lewis lion is Aslan which is an a-gram of nasal, which is something about something I don’t know, fake confidences, gaited struts and facial beams, holding up, I don’t know, their personality bank.)

*Examination of the brain or the cavity of a cerebral abscess by direct inspection. Is that like a drug bust? At the end of Traffic, Catherine ζ-function Jones smuggles blow into California as coke-solid dolls! So a cocaine bust might be something similar, especially when thought of in the context of that actress.

Speaking of transcendent properties and their epistemology (how we come to know things), the:–

Logarithmic derivative on the critical strip

where is the density of zeros of ζ on the critical strip 0 < Re(s) < 1 (δ is the Dirac delta distribution, and the sum is over the nontrivial zeros ρ of ζ).

and

In mathematics, the Prime zeta function is an analogue of the Riemann zeta function, studied by Glaisher (1891). It is defined as the following infinite series, which converges for :

The Euler product for the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) implies that

which by Möbius inversion gives

This gives the continuation of P(s) to , with an infinite number of logarithmic singularities at points where ns is a pole or zero of ζ(s). The line is a natural boundary as the singularities cluster near all points of this line.

Plans are a-Bodypart, Especially a-Foot.

Image © Peter Whincop 2011.

When we walk home from school every night, across the bridge over the ex-river, just bed now, we wish certain things. Not for things, just things. Just. We look in the river. Not so much water there, just ice. Justice.

But our judgments are clouded. Or our cloudments are judged. Call me someone who lived through the 60s—okay Peter was born in the 60s but only just, and I am near to being born in the 80s. No that’s a lie, I wish. We are the same age—it must have been all that acid because I am seeing what they mean when they say you can see things in the clouds. I can see Kennedy’s assassination, and I don’t even know any of the details. It is a virtul history lesson, inchoate. I know it involved an incontrovertible—what sort?—and a building and a gun. I see now how tires are changed on cars, how all those Kiwis and Aussies died at Gallipoli, and if I bought a Tonka tank instead of a car and we (oops!) had a daughter as cute as Peter’s niece <em>>, then we could teach her how to drive it! Even in, or seeing a sand[pit|box] [-bull|-] -terrier. And I think I see a chemistry set for her tenth birthday bunsening away there, and a very pretty girl up there, very. Before we played in our sandpit as kids, we had to check it for cat poop!

Peter says he misses what he thought was you. He was floating on cloud nine. It’s not even that you encouraged people to play golf on the rooftops of our fine city, he could have dealt with that—sh!t fcuked up as. Oddly, I have just thought how strange it is that Harvard has kept the “fas” part of all College/Graduate School of Arts and Science email addresses, e.g. Peter was “whincop@fas.harvard.edu”; it used to be “husc”. But you were to him:–

Flower of this purple dye,
Hit with Cupid’s archery,
Sink in apple of his eye

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

... of a storm, a blogstorm has been brewing like a cup of tea for two, like the two tease in that network channel, TNT, which, to sum up this sentence, are we being asked to first T the second T? Like teeing off the roof where (who? fun-lovers?) flog balls and hit on them. (“Flog” in New Zealand English means to steal, to hit, or to sell off cheaply.) I have exhibited great restraint. And on October 1st, some year, how about this for the screamplay:–

how much of us was real since my changed paintings and drawings reveal a lot but it would take years to analyze them and i am destroying everything you wrote to me physically and by computer because the little i have bothered to interpret has caused a complete identity breakdown which you have witnessed and in fact with others caused and i was supposed to cave but i didn’t even though i now realize the world is a truly despicable and dishonest and disingenuous place and if i am right about you then i despise you more than even you who are evil reified could possibly imagine and i shall not let that rest without converting it into actions which i cannot imagine anyone would especially like and i have to stop my research for the sake of my sanity because both obsession and the content have almost destroyed me in a way you had not planned on but i am far from ruined and i am well [prepared to fully recover] when the time comes and i feel that time is pretty much now and the big question that you could answer with the alternative being far worse by my researching further and you well know i am not that stupid even though you have been so full of misplaced hubris it is risible and i will find out even more and i know way more than you think i know

[There is no reference to bad contraptions, in case the Feds are wondering and listing, or waxing supercilious. We don’t use g*ns. Held them, yes. I’ve also been in an earthmover or groundshaker—I bet they can even do that, those impact and collision geophysicists—people think a meteorite is going to slam into our fair planet in 2012, scatological eschatology—and have operated some lever age or another—I don’t think it actually operated the machine/vehicle itself—but I wouldn’t trust me to do the subtler things of landscape gardening, I’d break the twigs in all the wrong places, push it one leaf too far.] Details were not going to be divulged here. No one knows who we are talking about, and if you do, you are wrong, go reckon again. Sometimes a kittypile is several miaows deep and some purrs too. And we are not talking. We are writing. We are not writing. We are tapping. (Check out our tumblr blog which has one of P’s compositions on it that has some boring detail about not talking or writing. Dumb.)

And then there is this, and I hope including the entire lyrics of a Loquat song is not naughty: I thought perhaps it was the other way around (read the lyrics), but, no. Well, perhaps now. But it was you, in innumerable ways, and I mean that in an ℵ₁ measure. Generously. The whole quotation here is for academic reasons, as we are both music faculty, to the word, not to the letters (haven’t got that Ph.D., fifteen years down the track; I got the idiot’s Harvard A.M. degree which means I suck). I am smitten with the voice and songs of Loquat (the timbre of the guitar is a bit nasty, not to criticize the actual work of the guitar, but the engineer got better at it in the second then third album; the singer’s voice is amazing amazing, especially when notes are hit exactly—which she is does for sure, or with no shouting; all perfect in the following song), and they sing of such tortured types of woe, some might say facile, some might say difficult (or even difficile), even fruitless, I’d certainly say with a culture of women claiming their rightful turf, as sisters they should. I’m more for siblings and everyone, but, etc. And I know this is a kittypile of kittypiles. A veritable palimpets. I say, wear their t-shirts and wait for their next album. You’re just a dandelion seed, that flies through the air, randomly, and disappears....

You used to throw gourds out the window
And I’d cover my mouth, laughing
You’d eat your broccoli with ketchup and cottage cheese
We look kind of the same
But you're different because you’re a time bomb

You’re not my strawberry girl
I know I’m awkward around myself
But this isn’t fun anymore
You make me feel obsolete

And it’s taken so long for me
To ignore you
And I'm so proud of myself

I never could predict the moment
When I’d be thrown in the closet
And I’d be stuck in there for months
Sitting locked in the dark

Mushed into my clothes
I’m much too afraid to ask you
To let me out of here
And start over without you

—Loquat, “Time Bomb” (Before the Momentum) [© attribution]

I don’t know if a disclaimer is necessary or not. And this just in, hot off the 1912 press, by Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant, an itinerant laborer who was active in the IWW. He made up the now-famous expression:–

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

...

—Joe Hill, “The Preacher and the Slave” [© attribution]

He then goes on to attack the Salvation Army and their hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” I wanted to use a nickname for them, since we call them the Sallies in NZ, but I see here they are the Sally Ann. One of the first links I clicked was alt.lawyers (cached in case this one bites it; this is true for everything I include), presumably as old as usenet itself. Ah, those lawyers, never can tell with language like that. Must have used more than just uuencode (from the man page: “Uuencode and uudecode are used to transmit binary files over transmission mediums that do not support other than simple ASCII data”—that has me thinking back to soundfiles...). And the Wikipedia page on Usenet has, as with most things freely dispersing around the internet appearing not to make money, the most amazing diagrams, which I will reproduce, with a wink in my left eye. (The right one got an apple jammed in it. Kind of got shoved in my mug. In fact, a crabapple. Yeah, that’s it, crabapple jelly and custard pie.) (I also wonder about buildings changing hands for big bucks but never a lot being done with them. Useful for the fourth of July, to get a good view I suspect—Cambridge/Boston’s fireworks are amazing, with pyrotechnic cubes and happy faces from the 60s and also numbers—or even for the finale in V for Vendetta, which I imagine 43% of MIT’s student population might like. Oh, meta-Google “Google Ron Paul” or go to http://www.apfn.net/ (or .org), a not-OTT fantastic web site in general, good essays. The first of its kind, I think. The video on how good capitalism is is a hoot.

Oh, here is the Wikipedia Usenet main map:

The other two diagrams will be in my next post because they are fascinating are here! Their descriptions make so much fall into place—the article (not so much usenet itself but its freakishly ubiquitous clones), the diagrams taken as a whole, free data sources, exchanges, Yiddish words like yadda yadda*. In that way it disturbs me: too much excitement is, well, too much incitement, and having such curiosity as to give rise to fascination doesn’t let me sit back and do nothing. It makes me want to use the bathroom! And to write.

“A diagram of Usenet servers and clients. The blue, green, and red dots on the servers represent the groups they carry. Arrows between servers indicate newsgroup group exchanges (feeds). Arrows between computers and servers indicate that a user is subscribed to a certain group and reads or submits articles.” [From Wikipedia, “Usenet.” Benjamin D. Esham, the copyright holder of this work, published it under the Public Domain license.]

“A visual example of the many complex steps required to prepare data to be uploaded to usenet newsgroups. These steps must be done again in reverse to download data from usenet.” [From Wikipedia, “Usenet.” Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.]

*And just because, I wanted to find a Latin translation of “yadda yadda,” as I saw it in an excellent book recently. I think it was borreo, fascio, or something like that, but I couldn’t find the idiom. I did, however, find this. I think there needs to be a theorem a little more sophisticated than the four-color map theorem: we need a wherefore color map theorem that not only proves things about figure–ground colorings, but about boundary conditions of colors in general, using endomorphisms, orbifolds, and graph theory. I will be posting on maps in the next fortnight (I was too weak to thing of the American term); I have a number of old maps, and books on maps, and looking down on earth from space I doubt has one in awe for any reason other than for its awesomeness; looking down on maps of countries, or counties, or heroin trafficking routes (there’s a great French cartographer who produces remarkable maps of “transportation”—the cotton trade, Hannibal’s tour of Europe, etc. and I will bring in many examples from him. And after that, unusually coded, or claimed-to-be-coded, texts, such as the Voynich manuscript—I thought it was “Voisnitch”!—and the Codex Seraphinianus—I have a tumblr-to-be blog post on that incredible Codex), bemuse me, like the pieces are put together in such a way that... you’ll see. It has in a painful way fascinated me for years. Again, as this is a slightly anachronistic editing effort, on my Tumblr blog, which runs parallel to this but the two never duplicate each other, I have music, Peter’s, since we haven’t worked out how to do it on Blogger. One piece talks about strange things, include maps. Briefly, but it’s the context, and what a con-text it is. (Our own site, anon-∞, has links to all these pre-figured blogs, sites, bookmarking things, social networking sites to be ignored, sites for posting sounds, music, and art, a writing publishing site, etc.)

Incidentally, my astrological sign is Taurus. The Bull. Makes me stubborn. And mine is Aquarius. The water bearer. Makes me bloated. [© attribution]

Like a Water, Under Troubled Skies, I will Lay me Down.

Image © Peter Whincop 2011.

Today I’m learning a kindred spirit to see-plus-plus: to code piano the Terry Riley way*.

Specifically, to understand the distribution and tagging of chunks in audio files; as the book says, to find the data that is not audio. There apparently can be, in RIFF-WAVs and AIFFs, any amount of junk, which therefore needn’t be junk. I wonder if the format was invented that way?—like our genome, though not designed—having the so-called garbage genes (which at least some evolutionary scientists believe are part of some imperative, not vestigial, nor accidental or superfluous). So I have taken out Richard Boulanger and Victor Lazzarini’s book (they edited it, almost 900 pages long plus a DVD of code), The Audio Programming Book from the fabulous music library at the college we teach at. I know I have a guardian angel, kind of on a rotating basis. Yes, that book in brimming, a font of wisdom; we can be composer/coders, or musicians, to learn so much. And everything, after all is said and done, says a little something about how the mind works, so reading it reaches untold depths; it also probes the history of synthesis and ways of coding, from Music V to MaxMSP or SuperCollider. Assembly language to C completing full circle back to assembly. One of the editors also edited The Csound Book. Need I say more than the fourth preliminary chapter/foreword text:–

The Csound Book is not meant to be “read“ from cover to cover. Although I have organized the chapters into thematic sections such as SOftware Synthesis, Signal Processing, Programming, Composition, MIDI, and Real-time, the material in each section does not necessarily progress from beginning to advanced. The best way to “read” The Csound Book will depend on your level of experience with synthesizers, signal processors, and computers. I assure you that there is something for both the beginner and the expert in every section, but given the breadth and scope of what is covered here, it is quite easy for beginners to lose their way. Below, I have outlined several of the paths I take with my students at....

(I plan on writing a detailed review of the two tomes: they are encyclopedic, and have forged new mechanisms for those omnipresent, prescient, and wonderful sciences, the sounds of the music technology helps us control, record, synthesize, modulate. Just waving the brain-flag for must-reads. Not that I am one for such excitement, might I add “fervently.”)

And they are both honest titles. I have a book called Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, which, a little into the first part, the author fesses up, and here I quote C. B. Delaney, in the official Amazon review section, “That’s too good to be true! Okay, author Joan Bolker admits she gave her book the title Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day to get the reader’s attention. And she admits that it’s unlikely you’ll actually finish a dissertation at that speed. As she tells her clients, however, a mere 15 minutes is much better than no writing at all when they’re stuck.”

Hence my blogs. They’re all about made up scenarios, not about fashionistas and soccer moms (although I like nice clothes, football, and my mother, this book is quite an anteater to that sucky concoction), and who knows if there is >strong<enough sanity squeezed between the bilge of glib digital seizures in my live blogsss.

And I think that UHU is a type of glue, a joke to keep chunks in certain (all?) file formats held together despite the strain caused by a bulge of data fat. Chew on that. I don’t know if 00010 01001 01110 00001 10010 01001 00101 10011 are the same.

*In C. Thanks, mnemonic cop. That make me catch up, know a lot. But is the composition really that aleatoric? Or has it been treated more as a (ongoing) fixed state than it should be?

When P taught at Harvard (as a TF = TA) he had (Peter here) a brilliant student named Richie Williams. I knew on the first minute of class, when we were selecting students—a class of 12 from 59 applicants! In Ivan Tcherepnin’s old teaching studios—that Richie should join us: he was a VES (Video, Et Setera... no, Visual and Environmental Studies department, really video/animation/film/photography/printmaking... art school stuff, in two of the nicest buildings on campus—Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, and H. H. Richardson‘s Sever Hall with two whispering arches) concentrator (major, main part of degree). He mentioned he wanted to make video feedback, and he was wearing pink socks with flowers on them.

A definite, as an aging friend (but aren’t we all?) used to say, champion (though I mean it in a positive context, and it stands up to the truth by any standards, also what that sweet angel used to say). That feedback thing: I designed a module composed of entirely of feedback performance for my beginner electronic music class. Two people, just two people (not one, not three, ...), stayed after class, six semesters apart, one on the first week, and the other on the fourth, to ask me what “feedback” is. An academic generation apart, yet... did they know each other? By any standards, the answer is no. But with these two, standards are lowered. This is no comment about knowledge, ability, or innate faculty, but on character: males are different from females when it comes to asking about feedback. Don’t ask.

Richie’s final composition in MUS 167r (Electronic Music Composition) was a version of In C... but in an electronic music class, in the “digital” second semester? His was to use all the small piano practice rooms in the basement of Paine Hall, the largest part of Harvard’s music department, each piano having a chunk of his version of In C and a pen if we wanted to alter the notes. We would then wander around, playing his piece for 10 minutes. Very much fun, amazing results. And there were parts in between our little stabs at playing piano—walking, talking, discussing the nature of the world—then back to another chunk of sound.

Digital? Pianos require fingers for his piece, he said.